FUTURE-PROOF EUROPE
Hartwig Tauber, Director General of the FTTH Council Europe, reviews the latest developments in the continent’s FTTH/B marketplace in terms of recent installation levels by country and forecasts from a range of market analysts. Heading towards a future-proof
European region is set to more than double over the next five years as the pace of roll-out has been increasing significantly for many countries recently. By 2019, in the European Union only, the total of FTTH/B subscribers is forecast to be almost 29 million, or 14.2 percent of all homes in the EU. Considering the whole European continent, comprising 44 countries from Iceland in the west to Russia and Kazakhstan in the east, 62 million households are expected to be FTTH/B subscribers in the countries covered – this is, about 19 percent of all homes in the region. In the next five years, Heavy Reading forecasts that the gap between the best and the worst performers will continue to increase. In absolute numbers, Russia is expected to remain the leading market in Europe by the end of 2019, with more than 22 million FTTH subscribers. France is expected to become the second largest market for FTTH after Russia, as incumbent diversified services provider Orange plans to cover almost 60% of all French households by 2020. As far as penetration is concerned, while a handful of countries such as Italy and the UK will continue to lag far behind with less than five per cent FTTH/B adoption, most of these are also expected to have passed the 20 percent “fibre maturity” household penetration line by 2019. In terms of FTTH/B roll-out, aggregate expectations are up across Europe compared to previous years, due to stronger than expected build-out in key FTTH/B markets such as Portugal, Spain and France, along with an ongoing massive roll-out in Eastern European markets. Furthermore, a
is also impressive, with 13.8 million homes passed at the end of 2014. Yet, a number of European countries are still holding back on their fibre roll-outs and are missing out on the socio- economic advantages that FTTH can bring. Countries like Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic or the United Kingdom connected fewer than 20,000 new FTTH subscribers during the whole of 2014. As a matter of fact, much work needs to be done before Europe can be considered a mature market. According to Heavy Reading, a country only reaches fibre maturity when 20 percent of its households are FTTH/B subscribers. So far, only nine countries around the world have reached this threshold, and only three of them are European, namely Lithuania, Sweden and Latvia. Nonetheless, the number of FTTH/B subscribers in the
including Russia and Ukraine, which would add a further 14.8 million homes to the total. Although there were no new countries entering the FTTH Ranking 2014, there is a notable new momentum in Germany where alternative operators such as Deutsche Glasfaser are pushing ahead with fibre deployment. The country will very likely enter the next update of our FTTH Ranking by reaching the qualifying threshold of one per cent of homes subscribing to fibre. Good progress was also reported in countries like Spain, Romania, France, Netherlands and Portugal. In Spain, incumbent Telefonica clearly played an important role, overpassing its initial objectives: overall the number of FTTH/B subscribers in the country increased by 137 percent year-on-year, reaching a total of nearly 1.4 million subscribers. Fibre deployment in the country
Hartwig tauber
T he creation of a but this process is undeniably underway, with a significant increase of fibre subscribers over the last two years. Moreover the number of FTTH and FTTB subscribers in Europe has increased by 50% over the 12 months ending December 2014, according to the latest update to the FTTH market panorama, prepared by analyst firm IDATE for the FTTH Council Europe. There are now nearly 15 million FTTH/B subscribers on the European continent (14.5 million to be exact) - not future-proof European communications sector is challenging,
0% 5% 10% 15% 20% 25% 30% 35% 40%
Lithuania Sweden Latvia Russia Romania Norway Portugal Bulgaria Slovenia Denmark Finland Slovakia Estonia
Luxembourg Netherlands Hungary Ukraine Spain
Turkey France EU28
Fibre-to-the-home subscribers Fibre-to-the-building + Lan subscribers
Macedonia Switzerland Czech Republic Italy
Household penetration of countries exceeding 1%. Image supplied by IDATE. *Economies with at least 200,000 households
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ISSUE 5 | Q3 2015
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